Category: Abstract

To honor of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s 147th birthday, here are six buildings inspired by his abstract, geometric style.

Artist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was introduced to art at an early age by his father, a drawing teacher at a local primary school. At the age of 20, formally began his career as an artist and teacher. His artistic career began with more traditional, representational paintings, however upon moving to Paris in 1911 his style was greatly influenced by Cubism and his work began to turn more abstract. Later, alongside painter Theo van Doesburg, Mondrian created the De Stijl movement, which embraced an abstract, simplified aesthetic. The De Stijl artists sought to devalue tradition, and they greatly impacted the rise of modern art during the 20th century.

Considered a pioneer of 20th century abstract art, Mondrian is best known for his paintings featuring basic forms and colors. The artist limited his paintings to the three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) and the two primary directions (horizontal and vertical), thus creating colorful and geometric compositions. He hoped that these simplified subjects could transcend cultures and become a new common language. Mondrian’s impact on modern art is visible in the work of other artists and subsequent artistic movements, as well as in contemporary art and design. Here are six projects that embody the spirit of Mondrian’s work.

A Mondrian inspired bathroom in Virginia
The clients for this small bathroom project are passionate art enthusiasts and asked the architects to create a space based on the work of one of their favorite abstract painters, Piet Mondrian. Mondrian, a Dutch artist associated with the De Stijl movement, reduced designs down to basic rectilinear forms and primary colors within a grid. Alloy used floor to ceiling recycled glass tiles to re-interpret Mondrian’s compositions, using blocks of color in a white grid of tile to delineate space and the functions within the small room. A red block of color is recessed and becomes a niche, a blue block is a shower seat, a yellow rectangle connects shower fixtures with the drain.

The bathroom also has many aging-in-place design components. There is a zero clearance entrance to the shower. The doorway is wider for greater accessibility and pocket door installed to save space. ADA compliant grab bars were located to compliment the tile composition.

A small bathroom project inspired by artist Piet Mondrian. Floor-to-ceiling glass tiles re-interpret Mondrian’s compositions.Design by Alloy Workshop
The design team used floor-to-ceiling tiles to create the geometric interior. Yellow tiles connect the shower fixtures to the drain, blue tiles are used for the shower seat, and a red block is recessed to create a niche in the wall.

Colorful Painted Home in San Francisco
The exterior of this home in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco was inspired by the colorful grid-based paintings for which Mondrian is best known. Painted in Mondrian’s style over 20 years ago, this whimsical house has become iconic also due to its location across the street from the beach. The two-story house features two beds and one bath, as well as a recently landscaped backyard—and it recently hit the market.Update:The Outer Sunset home bearing a paint job a la Piet Mondrian’s most famous work sold over asking, netting $2,050,000. That’s $555,000 over the original ask of $1.495 million. No word if the new owner will keep the exterior paint job.

The ‘Breakfast With Mondrian’ ApartmentBreakfast with Mondrian is an experimental project where the use of forms, lines and colors is focusing of the positive impact which has to provoke the space on the people living there. The design concept is inspired by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian for his vision of nature, manifested in his simple and pure abstract paintings. He is one of the founders of the Neo-Plasticism Movement, style which is recognized with the use only of horizontal and vertical lines and the fundamental colors – red, blue, yellow. With these elements the artist developed a new plastic language where he shows how he sees the world, the nature and the human – as one unity. In his paintings he represents the perfect harmony between the elements of this unity.
Mondrian’s aim is to provoke emotions to the viewers. The viewers should feel themselves dancing while watching his paintings. Through lines and colors the inhabitants and their guests should feel themselves as they are part of a dance. In the dance between forms and colors we use the white and black colors as intervals between them. The white is active, the black is passive. As Mondrian says that through oppositions of color and line one can see the plastic expression of relationships.
The space of this experimental modern house is open and every zone has its own function and in the same time is connected to everything else. The meaning is that the kitchen cannot be without the dining room, or living room. As in nature everything is connected and cannot without its parts, because one unity cannot be unity without its parts.Breakfast with Mondrian is a concept by design duo Brani & Desiinspired by the artist’s work and vision. Mondrian saw the world, nature, and the human as one unit, and he expressed these relationships through his geometric and colorful paintings. Brani & Desiaim to provoke the emotions of their viewers and to create unity within every aspect of the apartment.

The ‘Mondrianized’ City Hall in The Hague
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Dutch De Stijl art movement, The Hague unveiled the largest Mondrian in the world. The city hall building is painted with the familiar colors and lines of a Piet Mondrian work.

10 Years of SnarkitectureSNARKITECTURE PROJECT IS ABOUT OPENING UP THE POSSIBILITY, LEAVING THINGS AS OPEN QUESTIONS FOR PEOPLE THAT ARE COMING TO VISIT IT. THERE’S NOT NECESSARILY ANY PRESCRIBED MEANING — TO SAY IT’S ABOUT THIS OR ABOUT THAT — BUT HOPEFULLY, IT ALLOWS YOU TO WONDER.

Perched on a quartz topped column, beneath the crumbling, paint peeled dome of an 18th Century palazzo in Milan, Alex Mustonen is thinking about his legacy. Or rather, the legacy of his design firm, Snarkitecture, whose 2018 has been a banner year. They’ve celebrated their 10 year anniversary, published their first monograph with Phaidon, and have plans to mount a career spanning retrospective at Washington DC’s National Building Museum, opening this Fourth of July.

The moody Italian palace doesn’t just serve as a dramatic backdrop for ponderous self reflection. The trio, Mustonen, Daniel Arsham, and Benjamin Porto, have just installed their latest Salone del Mobile project there, a collaboration with quartz manufacturer Caesarstone, that explores water in its various states. It takes the shape of an ethereal amphitheater circling a terraced fountain of quartz. On top, planetary spheres of ice drift and creak, melting into the running water only to rise again as steam. It’s the latest in a sprawling roster of projects — 75 of which are detailed in the book — that Snarkitecture have dreamed into life during their decade-long tenure. They’ve morphed museums into massive, giggling ball pits (The Beach, ongoing), choreographed a ballet of over sized balloons during a gala at the New Museum, and filled the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York entirely with pure white styrofoam, which they then invited viewers to watch as they excavated it with chisels and icepicks

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It’s often said the core genius of Snarkitecture’s projects are their simplicity. For a union that formed in the cerebral confines of New York’s Cooper Union (Mustonen, in architecture and Arsham, art, attended at the same time, while Porto joined the firm later on), their installations and interiors strike straight to the heart of what brings us the purest kinds of joy. There’s an unabashedly innocent jubilation involved in doing a cannonball into a ball pit, marvelling at pirouetting balloons, or digging an endless hole to nowhere. In conceiving their much celebrated work, Snarkitecture are like children, having been gifted with the most expensive and high-tech of toys, instead choosing to make a fort from the box. Or, in their case, the packing foam.

Some days are easy going and good and somehow we arrive at the end of it a little wiser, happier, or maybe the same but unscathed. Then there are days we question our very worth and sometimes we don’t even know or understand why we derailed off the happy train. It’s those days that we need the extra kindness of friends and strangers, a smile, an acknowledgement that you are seen and even valued. We need a beautiful sight, a flower, a tree, a child, a beautiful human, something funny, the water or the forest, or at least the memory of such.

We need to give our smile to someone else because they may be feeling the same and need a little confirmation, a little love, too. You can never know the complete affect your little act of kindness can have on the world. So today, as easy or as confusing as it may be, I choose to let the universe flow through me as a confirmation that life is beautiful. And, I vow to let the people I love and the strangers I make eye contact with, feel valued and seen, and acknowledged. So I ask you to just smile at someone, make eye contact and say hi, you just never know! Let’s be better humans!

Photographer Timo Lieber uses his fine art photography to tell a story about the fragility of our planet. His latest project, THAW, conveys Greenland’s ice caps shooting the growing lakes from an aerial view. THAW will make its public debut from February 20 – 23, 2017 at Bonham‘s in London.

The resulting images are simultaneously stunning and scary. From a fine art perspective, the balance of colors, as well as the visually stimulating composition, draws the spectator in. From an environmental view point, Lieber’s work is an eerie reminder about the effects of global warming.

Year after year, Greenland’s lakes continue to increase in size, as the ice caps slowly melt. Since 2009, the Greenland ice sheet has been losing an estimated 419,000,000,000 tons of ice annually. This is three times more than the contribution from Antarctica. Thus, Lieber felt the urgency to shoot this transitional phase in order to raise awareness about climate change.

“THAW showcases the rapidly growing number of blue lakes and rivers that form on the Greenland ice cap —one of the most inaccessible areas on earth. Here, in the pristine landscape, stripped to the bare minimum of colors and shapes, the dramatic impact of climate change is more obvious than anywhere else in the world.”

Cool Events taking place around the world.

Tatsuo Mayajima’s “Connect with Everything” installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia

Few contemporary artists grapple with what it means to be human as profoundly as Japanese-born Tatsuo Miyajima, whose signature works are high-tech, immersive light installations that border on the mystical. “Tatsuo Miyajima―Connect with Everything,” the artist’s first solo show in the Southern Hemisphere, is on view at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and is as comprehensive a retrospective as the works deserve.

A Robert Rauschenberg Retrospective at the Tate Modern Switch House, London

Your excuse for a visit across the pond to inaugurate the Switch House – the Tate Modern’s new brick pyramid-tower extension designed by the same Swiss firm, Herzog & de Meuron, that transformed the massive Bankside Power Station into the enormously popular hub of modern and contemporary art – has arrived in the form of the first major retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg since the American artist’s death in 2008.

Organized chronologically and in collaboration with New York’s MoMA, where it heads next spring, the show unfolds as a riveting narrative, journeying through the maverick’s many seminal creative moments, from his striking blue monoprints and his extraordinary Combines.

Cy Twombly’s Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris

Cy Twombly, an artist who was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928 and moved to Italy in the 1950s, is in many ways very French. In the Salle des Bronzes Antiques at the Louvre museum in Paris, where ancient Greek armour waits silently for wars that will never come again, the room’s vast ceilingis painted by Twombly with a bright expanse of blue, its intensity illuminated by silver and gold suns and moons as if the light of the Mediterranean were infusing the museum with desire and danger. So it is fitting that France is staging the first Cy Twomblyretrospective since his death. On the top floor of the Centre Pompidou, the helmeted Greek heroes have returned. Gore, love and revenge stain the walls.

MOCA presents R. H. Quaytman, Morning: Chapter 30, the first major museum survey of work by New York–based artist R. H. Quaytman. The poetic, hypnotic, and singular work of R.H. Quaytman is on display in full splendor at “R.H. Quaytman, Morning: Chapter 30” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the first major museum survey of the NYC-based artist. Made up of 22 gesso-and-silkscreen paintings, the series “30 Chapters” is, like the 29 “chapters” that preceded it, a site-specific project that in this case takes inspiration from another site-specific work, Michael Heizer’s earthwork Double Negative, an excavation on the eastern side of Mormon Mesa in southern Nevada that resulted in two massive trenches. Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles; moca.org/exhibition/r-h-quaytman-morning. Through February 6.

The Opening of the Sumida Hokusai Museum, Tokyo

Despite the rich history of art in Japan, it is ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) — woodblock prints from the 18th and 19th centuries depicting everything from kimono-clad courtesans and kabuki actors to animals, plants, and dramatic, often romantic landscapes — that first comes to mind when one thinks of Japanese art, and that has had the most lasting influence on artists of every nationality (including 19th-century masters James Whistler, Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, among others).

Now there’s a museum devoted entirely to the country’s best-known practitioner, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), whose formal, masterfully composed works have, alongside those of rival Hiroshige (1797-1858), come to define the genre. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Kazuyo Sejima, the angular Sumida Hokusai Museum just opened in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward, where the legendary master lived and produced the bulk of his work in the mid 19th century. Don’t miss Great Wave off Kanazawa from his seminal “36 Views of Mt. Fuji” series.

Louise Bourgeois’s “Structures of Existence: The Cells” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen

Louisiana’s big autumn exhibition Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Existence: The Cells, presents one of the most striking and influential visual artists of the twentieth century. Over a period of some 70 years Louise Bourgeois (1911, Paris – 2010, New York) created a comprehensive oeuvre spanning a wide range of materials and forms, emotions and moods.

They are little huts of woven willow branches creating tunnels and arches, in and out of doorways. The art piece is called Double Take and here is a YouTube video about its installation. If you happen to be in the SF Bay Area Peninsula area, the Palo Alto Art Center is worth a visit. Patrick Dougherty’s sculptures have been there for a few years, and the sculpture will remain until the willow branches naturally decay.